Power BI – You don’t have access to this dashboard

Short version:

This invitation contains dashboards, reports or data outside of your organisation that cannot be viewed

The solution: add the administrator as an individual user.

Long version:

I recently shared a dashboard for 100 “strangers” and they couldn’t see it. That was embarrassing. Especially as the common bond we held cast me as Subject Matter Expert. Namely, I had presented to all of them on Power BI so when they received the above message I had egg on my face.

I honestly had no idea. My journey through Power BI’s invitation process had been seamless. They even got an email inviting them to…

I thought I was done and celebrated gloriously (because theoretically you can’t invite the ineligible). Meanwhile, they clicked, they got the error. Embarrassment ensued.

Having just spent several hours finding the solution I thought I would save you those same hours by sharing it. Once you’ve sliced through the chaff, the solution is surprisingly simple (and might I say very-MS):

Add the administrator’s email address as an individual user.

This, of course, is operationally null (and for that reason I imagine this post will have a short shelf life) but it does seem to work.

Hi, I am having this problem as well. Where do you suggest we login as admin? I have ‘Global Administrator’ permissions for our Office 365 setup and have published the dashboard using this account from Power BI Desktop. Sorry if I’m missing something, but it would be really great to get to resolve this issue.

Thanks, so does the global administrator’s name appear twice in the list of people who have access to the dashboard in Power BI? My name is only appearing once as the ‘owner’. It is also showing as my name rather than email address.